Annals of Political Palaeontology

'Twould be interesting to deconstruct this (link) to see which level comes in with which presidency. "...get Scalia's butt of the Supreme Court" echoes the Goldwater Campaign: "so help me god, You're Under Arrest, Warren!" "Charm and cash" must be from JFK. "Execute whom I please" sounds like a much better fit for, say, a former Texas governor.

It is the U.S. Capitol, outdoors. Chief Justice John Roberts rises from his seat and takes his place. The president-elect then stands and faces the chief justice. The presidential spouse places a Bible between them.

CHIEF JUSTICE: Please raise your right hand and repeat after me. I, Hillary Rodham Clinton...

HILLARY: I, Hillary Rodham, and, when I need it, Clinton...

CHIEF JUSTICE: do solemnly swear...

HILLARY: do vaguely commit...

CHIEF JUSTICE: that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States...

HILLARY: that I will be President of the United States, and execute whom I please...

CHIEF JUSTICE: and will, to the best of my ability...

HILLARY: and will, with my charm and cash...

CHIEF JUSTICE: preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States...

HILLARY: get Scalia's butt off the Supreme Court, followed by yours, pal...

CHIEF JUSTICE: so help me God.

HILLARY: So help me me.

CHIEF JUSTICE: Congratulations.

HILLARY: Now take off the black dress and sit down.

Cannons fire their salute. The Marine band plays "Hail to the Chief." Bill Clinton cabs to the White House to check the fridge.

Hoisted from the Comments: TigerHawk on the 50s

TigerHawk, offering a comment on my Bill Bradley post, recalls a rule of political thumb:

"Republicans want to go home in the 1950s, and Democrats want to work there."

Within the limits of the genre, that strikes me as fair comment. The 50s were the one decade in human history when someone as dumb as Homer Simpson could support three kids in a detached home with garage. And it worked through a grand conspiracy in restraint of trade: closed markets allowed managers and labor to capture and divvy out economic rents, while we all drove crap cars.

But then it gets more complicated. Seems to me one reason for the Goldwater Revolution of the 60s was southern/western resentment against the Northeastern Establishmen t, and in particular, against unresponsive capital markets and the high costs of imports. Establishment candidates like Nelson Rockefeller and Bill Scranton were happy to play along with the dirigiste consensus. How it must have blown Goldwater’s gasket to see Henry Ford and Walter Reuther on the podium together in opposition against him.

Barry Goldwater is Messin' With My Head

I’ve been having trouble sleeping this week. I have been absorbed in Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm, his riveting (okay, a bit overlong) account of the 1964 Presidential Campaign—more precisely of the conservative groundswell that culminated in the nomination of Barry Goldwater. It’s triggering lots of long-forgotten memories and stimulating new insights about stuff I never understood in the first place. In the end, I realize I never knew that much about Goldwater in the first place, and I had pretty much forgotten (among others) Nelson Rockefeller, foremost in a long line of paladins sent forth to save the Eastern Establishment—poor Nelson, who never realized that if you are a billionaire, nobody tells you that your shoes squeak.

Perlstein does some of his best stuff with his vignettes of so many now-forgotten figures who did so much to shape the Goldwater phenomenon. Who now remembers (for example) Clarence Manion, the sidewalk contractor’s son, who made himself a one-man conservative agenda-setter and king-maker (his first choice was not Goldwater, but Orval Faubus—and, come to think of it, who remembers Faubus?). Or Steven Shadegg, the one-man political machine, who put Goldwater into the Senate? Or Clif (one “f”) White, who organized the base and virtually single-handed gave Goldwater the nomination—only to be shunted aside by the candidate himself in favor of the homeboys from Arizona? None of them--Manion, nor Shadegg, nor White--has so much as a Wiki entry today.

This shunting-aside calls attention to one of the notable defects in Goldwater’s character—his crashingly poor judgment in people. It was Goldwater himself who dismissed White and Shadegg in favor of, say, Denison Kitchel , who seemed unable to do anything right, and Dean Burch, who didn’t seem to do much of anything at all. It was Goldwater personally who froze out all the counsels of prudence and good politics as he and a small core of true believers crafted the fatal “acceptance speech” that did so much to seal his fate.

Perlstein’s dominant motif is the blindsiding and ultimate disintegration of the “center-left consensus” that was supposed to have carried us beyond ideology. This is good, but it might gain from some historical perspective—I think pretty much the same sort of rebellion carried Napoleon III into power in 1851, and Kerensky out in 1917. The story also adds perspective to the accounts of the procession of boring, tin-eared candidates who have disappointed the Democrats so often in recent years.

I have to admit that I had pretty much forgotten—mercifully, I guess—the wave raw, angry energy that swept through American politics in the early 60s, culminating in the horrific Republican nominating convention at San Francisco’s Cow Palace in 1964. Most Americans think we live in parlous political times today. I would agree, but I must say that is sobering to reflect that our situation is not really unique. We’ve been here before.

Or in some sense, perhaps, we have been here all along. Most Americans have pretty clearly turned their back on The Incumbent President, but he still clings to his bedrock 33 percent in the polls. How does he do it? I don’t have any glib answer (though I will try to post some tentative thoughts later on). However he does it, we might as well recall that Goldwater never fell any lower—and that his bedrock was, if anything, more angry and assertive than Bush’s base today.

It’s tantalizing to try to compare Goldwater and the Incumbent. I’m not sure it teaches all that much. Goldwater seems to have been, in private matters, a decent and civilized man (he and Rockefeller shared a dislike for Richard Nixon)—The Incumbent has his advocates but on the whole, he seems more given to contention and swagger. There’s plenty of evidence that Goldwater never really wanted to be president—he seems most to have enjoyed flying planes and noodling around with his ham radio. His real skill was serving up to raw meat to the faithful on the rubber chicken circuit—though his campaign speeches were often tedious and off-putting (as a communicator, he wasn’t a patch on Ronald Reagan). The Incumbent appears to have been equally lacking in ambition until someone else put him up to it.

Goldwater and The Incumbent do seem to share some other noteworthy qualities. Apparently both were terrible students, and both seem to have nurtured a profound incuriosity about the great affairs of the Republic they sought to govern (Goldwater may never have read The Conscience of a Conservative, the hugely popular trademark tract that bore his name). But there is one inescapably important difference: The Incumbent made it to the White House; Goldwater went home to Arizona. He's back for the moment, though, messin' with my head.